The Greatest Show Off Earth

by Vanderleun on November 18, 2022

My up-close and personal relationship with Saturn is brand new. Sure, I’d seen the pictures and the “artist’s conceptions” all my life. I’d read the stories, both science and fiction, and I believed. I believed in Saturn. I had faith.

I had faith that Saturn existed and that it had the rings that made it the single most miraculous object in the solar system, save Earth — which may also be, except for our belief and faith in numbers, the single most miraculous place in the universe.

But my belief in Saturn and its rings was just that, “belief.” After all, I had never actually seen Saturn — only pictures and paintings. Saturn to me was only hearsay. That all changed a month ago thanks to a friend with a passion for astronomy and actual possession of a serious telescope, coupled with a moonless night at the edge of the pacific here in Laguna Beach.

With the events of the last year, I’ve often taken to mouthing a phrase picked up from someone else to give people a snapshot of my current take on our world. It goes, “I try to become more cynical every month but lately I just can’t keep up.” It’s so arch, so deftly faux-ironic yet yielding a bouquet redolent with a whiff of the flaneur and just a smidgen of edge. It’s a fine whine of recent vintage that’s just about as toxic to the truth about my inner life as a fresh, chilled pitcher of Jonestown Kool-Aid.

We often take up catchphrases like the one above and use them as an Etch-A-Sketch display of our souls; our means to signify ourselves to others without really having to engage them. If we do it too much, who we are fades out of sight to others and we are like the sailor on the far horizon flapping out semaphore code about our inner self. Then we become distressed when others only see the code and not the man in full. But it is of our own doing and sometimes we get so far inside the code that we can’t step out of it, step closer into the light, stand and unfold ourselves. Sometimes, it takes something the size of a planet to knock us out of orbit and back down to the surface of the planet we inhabit.

I needed a planet, and for my sins, I got one.

My friend and I had had one of those solid guy meals composed of good wine and a choice of pizza. Then we went outside on the terrace where a shrouded shape stretched up against the backdrop of ocean and night. His house is on the edge of the town overlooking the beach and the sea so it affords, except for the part of the sky taken up by the house, a fair chance of seeing what’s up there.

Light pollution is a problem I suppose since we are surrounded by a busy highway and a town whose other houses and street lights stretch up the hills around and behind, but the seeing is better than it would be in, say, my last home in Brooklyn Heights. Besides, it didn’t have a serious telescope pointed up at heaven. Telescopes are popular in New York, but they are seldom pointed up.

The evening haze had peeled off the sky and there was no moon. I looked out at the sea as he took the covering off the telescope and went through the rituals required to prepare the instrument. If this had been a decade or so ago, there would have been a long period of lining the telescope up, but this is the computer/GPS age and it was merely a matter of him entering some figures into a keypad and pressing “Enter.” The instrument hummed and swung across the sky through a small arc and stopped.

He bent over the eyepiece and moved the focus knob, then he stepped aside and let me take a look.

I pressed my eye against the mounting and saw…. well, I saw a pale, yellow smudge in the center of a dark circle. Then I moved my thumb and forefinger just a bit and in an instant, the smudge became a sharp, golden shape. And then, because it had rings, what the shape was became known to my mind — the planet Saturn. Real-time. Real sky. Real life. . . . .

Paid Members may read the rest here: The Greatest Show Off Earth at The New American Digest.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Ray Van Dune November 18, 2022, 9:29 AM

I also have what might be termed a “serious” telescope, of no great size, but of a quality that allows it to be used at relatively high magnification. A permanent mounting pier that goes 6 feet down into the earth helps, too. I fondly remember the pleasure of showing family and friends Saturn for the first time. My wife’s reaction was typical:
“I’m cold. Where do I put my eye? I don’t see anything… HOLY SHIT – is that real?!!”
Now, all invitations to look at the sky are met with the same question. “Is Saturn up?”

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Rob De Witt November 18, 2022, 1:16 PM

For Ray Van Dune (lotsa Dutchies in here today, ain’t?) or anybody else more informed than I am:

How far away would Saturn have to be in order for it to appear in the sky like the above illustration?

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Hale Adams November 18, 2022, 9:04 PM

Rob,

At a rough guess, one to two million miles. The Sun as seen from the Earth subtends an angle of about 0.01 radian (or about 0.6 degree). Or, put another way, the Sun is about 100 times farther away than its diameter (93,000,000 miles away as compared to its 860,000 mile diameter, give or take a bit). Imagine a smallish marble held at arm’s length.

That image of Saturn seems to subtend an angle of maybe 0.05 radian, or about 3 degrees. (Imagine a tennis ball held at arm’s length.) That means that it’s about 20 times farther away than its diameter (about 75,000 miles). So, 20 x 75,000 = 1,500,000 miles.

If Elon Musk has his way, and we can someday build Beanstalks (elevators to space — don’t laugh, a “pilot” model is likely to built in about 20 years), our great-grandchildren will probably be able to go there to sight-see, if they have a few years to spare for the trip.

My two cents’ worth.

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland

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- ghostsniper November 19, 2022, 4:29 AM
  
  Inneresting. Using your numbers, and a few more I’ll get off the web, today I’m going to try to model that in AutoCAD but I will change all the big numbers (miles) to inches to make it manageable. Then I’ll convert the end result back into miles.
  
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- ghostsniper November 19, 2022, 4:38 AM
  
  Don’t laff, weerder stuff has been done in autocad by bored, intelligent people.
  Back in the days of usent in the 90’s I came across an autocad drawing file and opened it. The screen appeared blank after opening the file. I did an inquiry in the program and it showed hundreds of entries, but none of them were visible. It took awhile of sleuthing but I found out that the paperspace of the drawing was in the hundreds of thousands of miles dimensions rather than the typical inches. (typically I draw buildings on 24″ x 36″ paper, but this particular file required paper that was 500,000 miles x 500,000 miles)
  
  What I discovered was a view of a small sign on the side of the lunar module sitting on the moon as viewed from earth. In order to view the sign I had to zoom in something like 90 times in order to get close enough to read the sign. I may still have that drawing file in the archives somewhere. Finding it is another story. Side note: what I also found while working on drawing files of that size is that a Windows XP with only 16 gigs of RAM will cause the MB to gurgle like grandma in the morning as it works the numbers. I currently have 64gigs so I’m not concerned.
  
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  - Vanderleun November 19, 2022, 9:24 AM
    
    “And it’s deep too.”
    
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Bo Nessround November 19, 2022, 9:50 AM

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” ― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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Ray Van Dune November 19, 2022, 11:38 AM

I seem to recall this photoshop from one of a series titled: “What solar system planets would look like if they were as close as the Moon”! Saturn is about 75K miles in diameter and the Moon is roughly 240K miles away, a ratio of (very) roughly 1/3. So it could be that.

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- Rob De Witt November 19, 2022, 3:56 PM
  
  Thanks, Ray.
  
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Yankee Tango November 21, 2022, 5:04 PM

You can get a decent look at Saturn with a pretty basic spotting scope in the 20-30x magnification range. Saturn is the pinnacle of solar system observations, second place is Jupiter and five, six or more of its moons.

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